Dasha Shishkin: erry icket

An extensive look into the wild world of Dasha Shishkin’s vibrant drawings, exploring the de-realities of her otherworldly yet strangely familiar scenes.

An extensive overview of Russian-born Dasha Shishkin’s work, the catalog contains over 100 images of her tremendously detailed and wildly, vibrant drawings. Included is an essay that details Shishkin’s inspiration, influences, process, and themes, as well as installation views from the MCASB exhibition, with works placed onto the walls in a salon-style fashion typical of her showings. This arrangement only contributes to the aberrant, intense, and sometimes overwhelming nature of her work. Shishkin’s creature-esque characters, widely encompassing scenes, and intensely detailed linework reveal the horror vacui sensibilities that create a world both captivating and disorienting. Even the titles of her pieces take on the attractive and distracting attitude that is inherent in her work.

Shishkin describes her scenes as “a city block that tells multiple stories,” as she is somehow able to capture the chaos and busy-ness of everyday life, depicting what could be a world in fast forward or an omniscient view of a packed city street. Such fascinating depictions seem both starkly different and strangely referential to everyday life, but reveal and unpack the sensations of discomfort, incoherence, giddiness, delirium, pleasure, and absurdity that come to characterize the lived experience.

The dust jacket for this catalog doubles as a vinyl/mylar poster that can be hung in a similar fashion to the pieces shown in the MCASB galleries during her exhibition.

Produced in conjunction with the MCASB exhibition Dasha Shishkin: erry icket, July 7 - September 8, 2013.